On Hallowed Ground (9 page)

With little fanfare, Congress had laid the groundwork for seizing the title to Arlington early in the war. Just as the Peninsula
Campaign heated up, lawmakers enacted legislation allowing for direct taxes in the “insurrectionary districts” in June 1862.
Amended in February 1863, the statute was meant not only to raise much-needed revenue for the war effort but also to punish
those supporting the rebellion. It enabled federal commissioners to assess and collect taxes on real estate in Confederate
territory; if those taxes were not paid in person, the commissioners were empowered to sell the land. Acting under that law,
the authorities levied a tax of $92.07 on the 1,100-acre Arlington estate in 1863. Mrs. Lee, stranded in Richmond by the fighting
and by deteriorating health, dispatched a cousin to pay her tax bill. But when Philip R. Fendall presented himself to the
commissioners in Alexandria, they informed him that they would accept the money only from Mrs. Lee. They sent him packing
and set the date for selling Arlington: January 11, 1864.
⁷¹

The Potomac River was covered with ice that day, with no boats running and carriages scarce. Although the auction was well
attended, arctic conditions seemed to chill the bidding. The sole offer for Arlington came from the federal government, which
tendered $26,800 for the estate, something less than its assessed value of $34,100.
⁷²
The new owners intended to reserve the property “for Government use, for war, military, charitable, and educational purposes,”
according to the certificate of sale.
⁷³

Because the auction was prominently reported in local papers, it is certain that the Lees knew about it, but nowhere in their
voluminous correspondence does this milestone appear to be mentioned directly. General Lee may have cryptically referred to
the sale a few weeks after the event, when he wrote to Mary on February 6, 1864. “I am glad you have not been discouraged
by the notice of the papers,” he wrote then, perhaps a reference to Arlington, perhaps to reassure his wife about the condition
of his army.
⁷⁴
It had been an especially harsh winter, with hundreds of his men barefoot and more than a thousand without blankets. Rations
were scarce, desertions mounting.
⁷⁵
Faced with these realities, Lee had little time to mourn the loss of Arlington.

For her part, Mary Lee, who after several months of separation had been briefly reunited with her husband a few weeks before,
was shocked to see how the war had aged him; now she refrained from burdening him with unpleasant intelligence from home.
She sent him socks, family news, and encouragement on the front, where Lee’s heart condition sent new spasms of pain down
his left arm. He kept busy, badgering the Confederate quartermaster for beef, shoes, and other supplies, while pleading with
President Jefferson Davis for reinforcements. Lee expected the new Union commander, Ulysses S. Grant, to concentrate his forces
for an all-out assault as soon as the weather allowed.
⁷⁶

This was precisely what Grant had in mind. On May 4, 1864, his army crossed Virginia’s Rapidan River and pressed to the south
with 119,000 men. His objective was not Richmond but Lee’s army, now reduced to a force of 62,000.
⁷⁷
As soon as Grant was across the river and into the tangle of scrub oak and briars known as the Wilderness, Lee launched a
furious attack, driving into the Union line and setting off a series of battles that would be among the bloodiest of the war.
For more than a month the generals fought their way south, with Grant trying to force his army between Lee and Richmond, and
Lee maneuvering to interrupt the blue tide. The Battle of the Second Wilderness raged down to Spotsylvania Courthouse, then
spread to North Anna River, Cold Harbor, Riddell’s Shop, and Petersburg. There the Forty Days’ Campaign finally sputtered
to a halt on June 14, leaving a seventy-mile trail of dead horses and charred fields behind. By then, Grant had crossed the
James River, just to the south of Richmond. The campaign had cost him 50,000 killed, wounded, or captured. Lee’s casualties
were less—some 32,000—but that amounted to half his army. Lee could not afford the depletion. Grant could.
⁷⁸

After the first clash that May, the inevitable backwash of wounded and dying soldiers piled into Union-controlled Fredericksburg,
a transshipment point where the injured—both Federals and Confederate prisoners—were borne into churches, stores, and shell-pocked
homes to await treatment. Others were dropped in the street, shoulder to shoulder and head to toe, lying so thick on the ground
that one cavalry patrol was forced to find another route through town. Many of the men died before they could be treated;
others starved in place before provisions could reach them. When the lines of transportation reopened to the north, the thousands
of injured men who had been languishing in Fredericksburg were collected on hospital transports and trains for the return
trip to Washington. There, as in past seasons of fighting, the wharves and depots overflowed once more with the wounded. By May 21, 1864, the
Washington Chronicle
reported the arrival of eighteen thousand new patients, a piece of news confirmed by the ambulance wagons jostling through
the capital’s streets day and night.
⁷⁹

Even as Washington blossomed with the promise of another spring, new battalions of injured soldiers lay dying in the city’s hospitals. They
quickly filled the national graveyards. The Alexandria National Cemetery was approaching its limit of one thousand burials,
as was the Soldiers’ Home, with its eight thousand graves. With the Union focused on winning the war, little attention was
paid to caring for the dead. Burial mounds eroded and caved in at the Soldiers’ Home; pools of standing water spread over
the graves; headboards rotted and disappeared in the mud. “The few remaining up [had] become so obliterated by exposure to
the weather that it was with difficulty many names could be read,” an assistant quartermaster reported. “In some places hardly
a trace was left, but for an unsightly stake, to indicate the graves of the departed.”
⁸⁰

Meanwhile, the corpses piled up in Washington faster than the quartermaster’s harried laborers could dispose of them. A stench of death hung over the city, pervasive as
wood smoke, prompting a new wave of complaints from war-weary citizens. In desperation, federal officials began scouting for
new burial grounds. They settled on Arlington.

4

FIRST BURIALS

While some details of Arlington’s transition from plantation to cemetery remain obscured by the confusion of war and the passage
of time, there is no doubt about the first soldier laid to rest on the Lee estate: That honor belongs to Pvt. William Christman,
twenty-one, of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, buried on May 13, 1864, just as Lee and Grant plunged into their blistering
Forty Days’ Campaign. The private’s grave was situated in a poorly drained sector of Arlington, down among the low hills skirting
what was then the Alexandria-Georgetown Pike. This far corner of the estate was out of sight of the mansion, where Union officers
lived and worked. Not wishing to have the view marred by new graves, they directed the first burials well away from the house.
¹

James Parks, the family slave who had witnessed Lee’s departure in 1861, was still living at Arlington when the initial wave
of war casualties appeared there. He went to work digging the cemetery’s first graves, struggling to keep pace with the long
rows of coffins that appeared each morning, stacked in the hills “like cordwood,” as he recalled it.
²
These burials took place in the Lower Cemetery, which describes a location as well as the social status of those destined
for the potter’s field, the place meant for poor enlisted men such as Private Christman.

Like others who would join him in the Lower Cemetery, Private Christman was felled by disease instead of a bullet. He developed
measles and died of peritonitis in Washington’s Lincoln General Hospital on May 11, 1864. A farmer newly recruited into the army, Christman never knew a day of combat.
He was committed to the earth on May 13 with no flags flying, no bugles playing, and no family or chaplain to see him off.
A simple pine headboard, painted white with black lettering, identified his grave, just like the marker erected for Pvt. William
H. McKinney, a Pennsylvania cavalryman buried on that same Friday the thirteenth.
³
They were joined the next day by Arlington’s first battle casualty, Pvt. William B. Blatt, 49th Pennsylvania Infantry. Wounded
in the Wilderness fighting and transported to Washington, Blatt died on his way from the wharf to Armory Square Hospital on May 13.
⁴
All three were from modest backgrounds, as were the other soldiers who soon filled the Lower Cemetery: Alvah Kirk from New
York, Artemus Sweetland from Vermont, Lyman E. Besse from Maine, Peter Rawson from New Jersey, Moses Hatch from Massachusetts, and Levi Reinhardt from North Carolina.
⁵

Reinhardt, a wounded Rebel prisoner who died in Washington’s Carver General Hospital, was buried alongside his enemies at Arlington, just as hundreds of other Confederates would be
in the last years of war. Several hundred freedmen, who lived and died nearby, would join them in the Lower Cemetery, as would
the U.S. Colored Troops who had been fighting for their freedom as well as their lives; the blacks would lie a few rows away
from Christman, Reinhardt, and the others, but in the manner of the times, they were scrupulously separated by race.
⁶

Officers got better treatment. Less than a week after Private Christman came to rest in the Lower Cemetery, the first Union
officers were given prominent burial close by the Lee mansion. The first of these, Capt. Albert H. Packard of the 31st Maine
Infantry, was interred on May 17, 1864. He was placed at the edge of Mrs. Lee’s garden, about a hundred paces from the mansion,
with its sweeping views of the river and capital. Packard, shot in the brain during the Wilderness fighting, miraculously
survived his journey from the battlefield to Washington’s Columbian College Hospital, where he died on May 16. Buried the next day, he occupied a part of the grounds where Mrs.
Lee had enjoyed reading in warm weather, surrounded by the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine.
⁷
Before the middle of June, six other officers were sleeping on the hillside with Packard, their graves guarding the garden’s
eastern border.
⁸

The placement of these tombs illustrates a bit of strategic maneuvering by Meigs, who planned to make Arlington uninhabitable
for the Lees after the war—unless they wished to live among ghosts.
⁹
Meigs also knew that planting Mrs. Lee’s garden with prominent Union officers would make it politically difficult for anyone
to disinter these heroes of the Republic.
¹⁰

The old estate made a logical site for new burials in any event. Since January 1864, the Union believed that it held clear
title to the property. There was still plenty of open land there, and it was convenient to Washington’s hospitals, yet at a discreet distance from the capital’s population. And there was precedent for a cemetery on the estate.
Members of the Custisclan had been buried there, as had the family’s slaves, and after them the many contrabands and freedmen
who found their way north during the war.

It is clear that Meigs had formed a master plan for Arlington before he sought permission to make it the nation’s preeminent
graveyard. A week in advance of its official designation as a burial place, he was already referring to the “new cemetery”
and describing how it would handle the growing traffic of interments from Washington.
¹¹
In one often-repeated account of the cemetery’s origins, Meigs and President Lincoln get joint credit for the idea. According
to this story, which seems rooted in Meigs family lore, the moment of inspiration came on May 13, 1864, as Meigs and Lincoln
were visiting Arlington on a carriage ride. Their outing was interrupted when the general noticed a crew loading a dozen dead
soldiers into wagons from an Arlington hospital for burial at the Soldiers’ Home. He stopped the presidential carriage and
ordered the dead to be buried on the spot, and thus began Arlington National Cemetery—so goes the legend.
¹²

Yet files from the Office of the Quartermaster General cast doubt on this time-honored story. The record shows that the first
military interments at Arlington came from hospitals in Washington, not from one on Lee’s estate; that the first burials were sent to Arlington not en masse but in small shipments over a number
of days—two on May 13, six on May 14, seven on May 15, two on May 17, four on May 27, one on May 29, two on May 30, one on
June 8, one on June 9, and one on June 13; and finally, that the only hospital operating at Arlington when Meigs and Lincoln
are supposed to have visited was Abbott’s Hospital, a fifty-bed facility that treated the residents of Freedman’s Village—not
white soldiers such as Christman, Blatt, and others in Arlington’s first colony of burials.
¹³
The most likely explanation is that Meigs and his fellow officers hit upon the Arlington idea, put it into practice under
the exigencies of war, and sought bureaucratic approval after the fact—not the first time a military officer would request
authorization for something he had already done.
¹⁴

Private Christman had been in the ground for barely a month when Meigs moved to make official what was already a matter of
practice at Arlington. “I recommend that … the land surrounding the Arlington Mansion, now understood to be the property
of the United States, be appropriated as a National Military Cemetery, to be properly enclosed, laid out, and carefully preserved
for that purpose,” Meigs wrote to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton on June 15, 1864. Meigs proposed carving a two hundred–acre
parcel out of the property—more than a fifth of the plantation—for the new graveyard. He also suggested that Christman and
others recently interred in the Lower Cemetery be separated from the contrabands and slaves and reburied closer to Lee’s hilltop
home. “The grounds about the Mansion are admirably adapted to such a use,” he wrote.
¹⁵

Edwin Stanton, whose disdain for Lee matched Meigs’s, endorsed his quartermaster’s recommendation on the day it was put forward.
“The Arlington Mansion and the grounds immediately surrounding it are appropriated for a Military Cemetery,” Stanton ordered.
“The bodies of all soldiers dying in the Hospitals of the vicinity of Washington and Alexandria will be interred in this Cemetery. The Quartermaster General is charged with the execution of this order.
He will cause the grounds, not exceeding two hundred acres, to be immediately surveyed, laid out, and enclosed for this purpose,
not interfering with the grounds occupied by the Freedmans [sic] camps.”
¹⁶

Loyalist newspapers applauded his action. “This and the contraband establishment there are righteous uses of the estate of
the rebel General Lee,” the
Washington Morning Chronicle
reported.“The grounds are undulating, handsomely adorned, and in every respect admirably fitted for the sacred purpose to
which they have been dedicated. The people of the entire nation will one day, not very far distant, heartily thank the initiators
of this movement.”
¹⁷

Meigs visited the new cemetery on the morning of its creation, touring the place with Edward Clark, the engineer and architect
he assigned to survey the property. On that tour of Arlington, Meigs was incensed to find that his orders to cluster graves
around the Lee mansion had been ignored: most of the new burials were still being placed in the Lower Cemetery. “When the
season permits it the bodies lately interred there … will be removed to the National Cemetery at Arlington,” he told Brig.
Gen. D. H. Rucker, the officer in charge of the quartermaster’s Washington Department.
¹⁸
It is clear that he meant for Private Christman and others to be reburied closer to the mansion. Yet it was an order Meigs
found devilishly hard to enforce. “My plans for the cemetery had been in some degree thwarted,” he recalled later.

It was my intention to have begun the interments nearer the mansion, but opposition on the part of officers stationed at Arlington,
some of whom used the mansion and who did not like to have the dead buried near them caused the interments to be begun in
the Northeastern quarter of the grounds near the Alexandria road.

On discovering this by a visit I gave special instructions to make the burials near the mansion. They were then driven off
by the same influence to the western portion of the grounds … On discovering this second error I caused the officers to
be buried around the garden.
¹⁹

Meigs blamed Gen. Rene E. DeRussy, who had his headquarters at Arlington, for subverting his plans. To make sure this did
not happen again, Meigs moved to evict DeRussy and his staff from the mansion, replacing them with two full-time chaplains
who would oversee day-to-day operations at Arlington.
²⁰
The appointment of chaplains also served another purpose—to quell public criticism of the military’s slapdash approach to
burials. “The Quartermaster’s Department is, I think, unjustly blamed for interring the soldiers without appropriate ceremonies,”
Meigs wrote Edwin Stanton on June 16, 1864. “It has not the appointment or employment of chaplains,” Meigs protested. “Its
officers are occupied with their appropriate duties, and cannot be present at the cemetery constantly. The interments are
going on all day.”
²¹

Meigs then suggested a solution. If chaplains set up residence at Arlington, they could “take charge of the whole conduct
of the interments, and perform appropriate religious services over all persons interred therein.”
²²
Stanton quickly approved the plan.
²³
DeRussy was out and Meigs’s chaplains were in, along with Capt. James M. Moore, a loyal lieutenant from the quartermaster’s
corps. Moore and his family moved into the mansion to keep an eye on the cemetery. These administrative shifts proved to be
critical in the evolution of Arlington, which would gradually become less important as a strategic military site and more
so as a national symbol of the martial virtues—duty, honor, and sacrifice.

Once Meigs had his new bureaucratic arrangements in place, Mrs. Lee’s garden began to fill with graves. Union captains and
lieutenants joined the handful of officers already sleeping on the hilltop, one felled by a shot to the chest, another by
a thigh wound, an arm wound, a face wound, a shoulder wound, a knee wound. Others died of diphtheria, typhoid, or dysentery;
others from the shock or infection from amputation. One died from drinking bad whiskey.
²⁴

The most curious garden burial was marked by a short, square stone with no identifying name, merely the number 5232. Beneath
it three amputated legs had been interred, all from Union soldiers treated at Judiciary Square Hospital in May 1864. One of
the legs belonged to James G. Carey, a private in the 106th Pennsylvania Infantry, who not only survived his operation but
lived until 1913; the fate of the second solider, Arthur McQuinn, 14th U.S. Infantry, is unknown; the third, Sgt. Michael
Creighton, a native of Ireland in the 9th Massachusetts Infantry, survived his amputation for two weeks but died on June 9,
1864. He was interred in the Lower Cemetery the next day, separated from his left leg by more than half a mile, which makes
him the only person at Arlington with two graves.
²⁵

In a capital where surgeons performed amputations throughout the Civil War, it is unknown why the legs of Creighton, McQuinn,
and Carey were chosen for this peculiar but honorable burial. Unlike most others in Mrs. Lee’s garden, none of these three
was a commissioned officer, which places them in a distinct minority.
²⁶
Most amputations were buried in unmarked mass graves or burned. Why was this trio singled out? Perhaps their symbolism mattered
more than their individual identities, another rebuke for the Confederate general who had caused so much Union suffering.
The gesture could not have been an afterthought—someone had to label the remains, transport them from the hospital across
the river, record the particulars in a ledger, ready a marker for the grave, and bury the legs in the garden. Like much else
that transpired at Arlington in those days, there is no official explanation for it, just a worn white stone rooted in the
grass, one of three thousand graves appearing in Arlington’s inaugural year as a military cemetery.
²⁷
By the end of that year, some forty officers’ graves had filled the garden, while most other burials were destined for the
Lower Cemetery or to a new section just west of the mansion.
²⁸